The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [27]
“Will you lie on top of me?” I asked.
“What?”
I looked up at him, at his beautiful prematurely creased face, the freckles that peppered his nose and cheeks from too much time in the sun, his blazing white teeth.
“You trust me, right?” I said.
“Sure.”
I did not stop to wonder what I looked like. I stood up, and so did he. I opened the door to the back and crawled in across the bench seat.
“Get in,” I said.
I thought of my mother on the cold cement floor. I lay on my back with my feet hanging out over the drive. Hamish crawled in but sat on the edge of the seat with the open door behind him.
“I’m not sure what this is,” he said.
“I’m cold,” I said. “I just want to feel your body on top of me.”
I wanted to fuck him.
I closed my eyes and waited. A moment later, I could feel Hamish gingerly—too gingerly—place his body over me. He was bracing himself against the backseat and still resting most of his weight on the floor.
“I don’t know what you want,” he said.
“I want all of you on me,” I said, opening my eyes.
“Hell,” he said. “I’m . . .” He glanced down his body instead of finishing the sentence.
“Just put your full weight on me,” I said. “It’s fine.”
And then, within a moment, his body—all, what was it, 185, 190 pounds?—was laid out on top of me and pressing down. I felt his erection against me, the tops of my feet jostling the middle of his shins, his face to my right, his ear a seashell tunnel beside mine. I thought of the phone in my mother’s kitchen. How many times had it rung before stopping?
I brought my right hand up and ran it along his side until I found the edge of his T-shirt, then slipped my hand up under it and onto his bare skin. He grunted beside me, an animal waiting to be touched. Sarah had had a crush on Hamish, growing up.
“We can do anything,” I said.
It was as if I’d turned a key. He raised his head. His eyes looked dreamy and distant in a way I’d never seen the eyes of my best friend’s son.
“Sure, baby,” he whispered, and I tried not to hear the tone in his voice. A tone I was aware he adopted with the women I’d seen riding on the back of his motorcycle. They wore ludicrous shorts while wrapped around Hamish’s Kevlar-encased torso and legs. I tried to picture myself clinging on to him. He had more than once invited me to do so, but I had always declined. “He has the hots for you,” Natalie had said once, and the two of us had laughed together as we drove off to some sort of pitiless exercise class while Hamish peeled off in the opposite direction on his Japanese death machine.
His lips were pendulous, ridiculous, young. I reached my arm up and pulled his head down to kiss them. I was beginning to feel his weight, his bones against my bones. I would have wished it could be different than this, that I could have fucked my best friend’s son without having to be made aware of it. I tunneled into it, firmly now, as I realized thinking was not going to get me anywhere. Morality was just a security blanket that didn’t exist. All of it, what I had done and what I was doing, was not leading me perilously toward the edge of a cliff. I had already jumped.
I tugged upward at Hamish’s shirt, and taking his weight away from me for a moment, he peeled it off over his head. He was beautiful, his chest muscular and divoted, but his beauty was as much about youth and a life still ahead of him as anything else. I felt a stab of regret.
I turned my eyes away from his face and unbuttoned my pants. As he rushed to help, he bumped his head on the inside of the passenger-side door. It made a horrible hollow sound. I thought of Mrs. Leverton hitting the ground outside her house six months ago. How she had called through the bushes to my mother to get help. How the enemies had fleetingly bonded. They were desperate to be able to continue living on their own in their own houses.
Mrs. Leverton thought I was a degenerate, a failure as a wife who modeled nude for a living, but in one solid sense she was envious of my mother. Mrs.